their middle years.
“For the queen likes her own beauties to shine forth, undiminished by those of others,” they explained.
Now I was curious. “She is very fair, then, the queen?”
“Yes, indeed. Giovanna of Aragon is a great beauty,” said Diana generously, with the others nodding agreement.
I was curious as to their relationship with the queen, for although I had been betraying noblewomen by fucking their husbands for a good few years now, I had never actually known the ladies. What was it like to live under the eye of the woman who knew you were warming her husband’s bed?
“Oh, we like her.”
“She is lovely.”
“I am proud to bear her name,” said the one who was clearly Giovanna. “On our shared saint’s day she gave me a rosary for my missal.”
I was curious. “And she is faithful, to Don Ferrente?”
“Oh, yes. Without question. He is not a man to be trifled with, for he can show great cruelty and violence to those who betray him. Certain of his rebellious barons have been recently murdered on his orders, some of them friends since the cradle. And for women it is even worse.”
“In Sicily, my dear, if you betray your husband with another, your husband can beat you to death with the full support of the law.”
I swallowed. The strains of the Neapolitan song drifted back to me from this morning, carried on the chimes of Vespers. “Jesce jesce corno,” indeed. If a man strayed, he was a horned snail in a comic song. If a woman strayed, here in the hot and passionate south, she was as good as dead. The king slept with three different dames every night right under his wife’s nose, but a queen had to be beyond reproach. I thought hard on this as the ladies fluttered around me once more, pulling and pushing me, twisting strands of hair, applying ribbon and jewels, lacing my bodice. I had ever lived outside this law, outside the strictures and proprieties that governed other women. I had been turning tricks since I was old enough to bleed. Could I ever live this way, as a “decent” woman, so strictly policed in all her behavior? And what of love? Did that simplest and strongest of feelings have a place in the noble world of court? Did the king truly love the queen; could he love her, when he shared his favors so widely? And yet if he did not, why would he care if she took another lover? It was all most confusing. It was fortunate, really, that I was not a noble-woman.
I was so deep in thought that I barely noted what I was being dressed in until they pulled me to the looking glass. I gasped.
Once again, as in Pisa, I was transformed. But they had made me into a dove among the blackbirds—I was dressed from head to foot in white. My dress was stiff with a thousand seed pearls and stood out from my waist in a hugely full skirt like a bell. A delicate ruff of lace adorned my shoulders and framed my face, now pale again from days belowdecks. My hair was more blond than ever, bleached of its color by the sea salt and sun, twisted up into ripples by the ladies with the same pearls pinned into my locks. My skin was as pale as the gems that adorned me. I had been transformed into the very Grace whose identity we sought here in Naples. And then the notion chimed; in Florence I had been Flora. Here I was one of the Graces. Was I destined to inhabit all the ladies of the painting in turn?
Despite my spectral beauty, however, I knew, too, that the Chi-chi glitter in my eyes was back. I was a honeypot, a walking temptation for all the men of this court. Why, then, was I not excited? Why did I not plan, as I usually did, for some hot and licentious union with a random fellow this night?
I knew, of course. Jesce jesce corno. As I followed the ladies to dinner, an alien thought struck me. I had ever been a faithless slut, but I knew now that there was only one man I wanted, and if I could but marry him, then I would never stray.
21
The ladies led me through a dozen piebald presence chambers, in a procession of other magpie courtiers until presently the space opened out into an enormous banqueting hall with elegant cross ribs arching high